Posted
by
timothy
on Sunday November 06, 2011 @12:32PM
from the you-must-have-some-steak-with-the-sizzle dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Why are Android device commercials showing giant robots and lightning bolts and not advertising features? Here is an interesting blog post of things Android device manufacturers could be doing to get ahead of Apple, but aren't." On a similar front, as a mostly happy Android user, I must admit envy for the jillions of accessories marketed for the iPhone, especially ones that take advantage of that Apple-only accessory port; maybe the Android Open Accessory project will help.

It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience. You can see it with Linux. Even if the Android advertisements would include features, I have a strong feeling it would be something like "Freedom! 1 GHz processor! 128MB RAM!", ie. just listing specs. That isn't interesting. Users don't know what and why. They don't need to know the specs. In this day and age everyone has lots of things to do, and contrary to popular Slashdot belief, normal people have no need to learn such things. Hell, there's many things I could learn and which would improve my daily life, but I rather learn more about things that really matter and interest to me - that being computers and everything related. At the same time I can see everyone is the same way, but about other things. I don't expect them to know computers or what I know, and they don't expect me to know everything either. Then you can just laught it off. That's being social, something nerds are really bad with.

What most nerds don't get about advertising and user experience is WHY. What can this do to me and why? "What do I get out of the freedom of Android (or Linux)?" It needs to be something that the user, the normal user, actually cares about. As a side note, I honestly can't think of any reason the freedom of Linux would provide to casual users, compared to Windows and OSX. That is probably the reason why Linux still isn't on desktop. It's also what Stallman constantly forgets to mention and just comes out as an asshole trying to force everyone to FOSS.

The iPhone ad shown in the article is actually perfect. It answers why, it shows what you can do and it doesn't go on and on about things users don't directly care about, like processor speed. Hell, I'm a geek and that ad made me want to buy iPhone (and on top of that iPad too!). The Android advertisement just left me thinking if it's an advertisement for some movie or wtf.

No it's because iPhones are marketed like wine. The people who buy them are going to love them at least somewhat based upon owning something of "quality". Something that's exclusive. Something that's better than what you have, because it is. And much like wine, you're never going to convince them that Android has all the same features. Because they have a price differential to prove otherwise.Granted at one point the iPhone was far ahead. But it has long since become about the cachet of being able to afford

Yeah, because Android users don't have contracts or subsidized phone. Get real. The vast majority of Android users are paying the same price for voice and data as their Apple and Blackberry loving counterparts. The vast majority of Android users are also using a subsidized phones and, yes, many of the leading Android phones are going for prices that are in line with their iPhone cousins.

So you're dead wrong. While some Android device might be able to be got for a lower price point and while you may be able to get them with a cheaper data plan, the vast majority of Android users simply aren't doing this.

You missed his point... it isn't about what the average android user has blah blah blah... it is about his specific example where EVEN CHEAPER AND UNSUBSIDIZED his wife STILL isn't as impressed as a the more expensive option with Siri.

In fact, you're being so obtuse you don't even realize that you and tthomas48 AGREE.

No. other poster was right. I was basically pointing out that my wife tweets by voice with her android phone and is really happy with it. Yeah, she has to click on the twitter app first. But she doesn't get why having Siri being able to launch twitter and then send the tweet automatically is somehow worth the price premium.

Actually, all your examples can already be achieved with voice commands on Android.

What Siri does best is the interface with the user, unlike voice commands, it provides some kind of natural language processing and gives reasonable feedback... And that's something no one ever thought about. Most developers worked on trying to have the phone recognize your voice really well, and spent very little time in the actual user interaction.

My hat goes out to Siri, but if google wanted they could achieve Siri in a we

Meh, most of the big name android devices cost the same as the newest iphone, with service plans that cost the same.

Thing is, you can attack the problem from a price perspective or you can try to go head-to-head against apple in their own court. You can't really do both.

Porsche and VW have been down this road. You have to keep things very separate or one messes up the other. To some people an Android phone is that dogshit $100 phone that looks and works terribly. To others its the insanely crazy (and iphone-expensive) galaxy. Selling the two next to each is bad news... but that's how it goes with an OS deployed over a gajillion devices.

I see us heading to a bazaar situation in mobile some day. A real one. And then apple is going to get kicked out on their ass again, just like they did in the PC market when commoditized home computers yanked the market out from under them.

I see us heading to a bazaar situation in mobile some day. A real one. And then apple is going to get kicked out on their ass again, just like they did in the PC market when commoditized home computers yanked the market out from under them.

Siri is a lot more impressive than Android's voice functionality, which is basically just voice-to-text with the ability to say "call X", "send text to X", or "navigate to X" tacked on. iCloud is similarly impressive.

Yes, I can do almost all of those things with Android, using Dropbox and Flickr and Amazon, but with Apple you can just turn on iCloud and you're done. No setup required. If saving $60/mo is a really important thing to you, then you're not Apple's target market. They sell to people who have plenty of money and don't want to have to think about their technology. And the iPhone 4S, despite lacking 4G, is in most ways the best phone on the market. When you get down to it, now that Apple stole the notification bar, the primary reason I still use Android is Swype.

The morning of the iPhone 4S the news crew was out downtown talking to a new owner who waited all night for one. He was like "this Siri thing is cool" and asked the phone for the local weather, and it gave him the current time... on camera. That was pretty funny.

I've experienced the same thing with the voice control on my Galaxy S, so I stopped using it. It took longer to get it to do what I wanted with voice than to just type it in.

You can make a good argument for whether $25-30 / mo (I don't know where $60 / mo is coming from) diff between feature and smart phone is worth the jump from EVDO data to 3G data with another $10 / mo going

It's 3G data. It is interesting, though. I've found that because people are so used to paying > $50 for a phone with any sort of data plan they find it really had to believe that the $35 can actually be real and worthwhile.

Realized I should respond to both parts of your comment. My experience with Siri is that it's at least as good as Google's voice-to-text was a year ago, and that it's a lot more capable - the voice-to-text part of Siri isn't the part that's interesting, it's that it has natural language processing and can interact with your data much more capably than Android's Voice Actions.

I'm an IT professional as well. There are features like near top of the line CPU and battery life which are great. The subsidy from the carrier are a little larger and so all things being equal you get better hardware. The warranty at $99 / 2 yrs sure beats the $7.50 mo for an Android warranty. But in general you might very well find a better fit for yourself hardware wise on Android, if not at least close enough. Hardware wise there were some HTCs I was very tempted to buy, lack of options is not a

Some other facts are, the iPhone doesn't need a removable battery - that is a red herring and has been proven out by the millions that continue to purchase upgrades to the iPhone rather than go with a new Android phone with a removable battery and the constantly extremely high customer satisfaction rate far above the Android user satisfaction.

Android phones (all the ones that I've seen) require an SD slot because they are so anemic with internal storage.

No it's because iPhones are marketed like wine. The people who buy them are going to love them at least somewhat based upon owning something of "quality".

Partly. I bought my latest iPhone to replace the gen1 iPhone I had previously purchased second hand. At the time, android was still beIng tested, and the iPhone was better than my razr and Nokia candybar, and about 75% as useful for Internet stuff as my old Linux iPaq (but it actually fit in my pocket!). The iPhone4 was purchased due to laziness and lockin. Had I expended effort to port my data, I would have purchased an n900 just before Nokia whored itself out to Microsoft. Sure glad I didn't make the

No, it's because iPhones are marketed like lumber - as a commodity. If I go buy an iPhone, it's just like every other iPhone, right out of the box. No need to do any research. If I read about an app in a blog, I can download it and it runs, period. Etc... etc...

I have used many devices from many manufacturers (worked in telecom), and a few of the other devices are nice when they're new, but Apple devices (not just phones, also laptops) are still nice when a couple or more years old. Apple keeps supporting their stuff really well, especially if you get the cheap OS upgrades.

Apple is in the game to keep their customers. That's how they create such a loyal following.

To do this they make high quality devices, and those have a certain alure to some people like Mercedes

Even if the Android advertisements would include features, I have a strong feeling it would be something like "Freedom! 1 GHz processor! 128MB RAM!", ie. just listing specs. That isn't interesting. Users don't know what and why.

OK. Then if you were a manufacturer that made phones with say, 32 GB (let's assume that's double the maximum everything else), market it?

Even if the Android advertisements would include features, I have a strong feeling it would be something like "Freedom! 1 GHz processor! 128MB RAM!", ie. just listing specs. That isn't interesting. Users don't know what and why.

OK. Then if you were a manufacturer that made phones with say, 32 GB (let's assume that's double the maximum everything else), market it?

Oh my god. No one cares about that bullshit! You just estimate a song at 3:30 and say 256kbps and multiply it out! Your mother is not going to flip through her music collection and sue the phone maker because she only got 3/4ths the number of songs promised. And most likely, if someone has that much music or that unusual of a collection, they'll figure out ahead of time if it will fit!

You wouldn't. Look at what Apple does: they hype Facetime, then Siri, and then when you go to buy that, you have to choose between the economy (16 GB), Regular (32 GB) or Deluxe (64GB) model. Flash or RAM size is not a deciding factor: most people don't really know what it does, everybody has the same, and most have SD card anyway, or had rather not say they don't.

It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience.

Hit the nail on the head. There was a huge contingent here jeering and predicting in dire tones the huge failure of the iPad between its unveiling and release. Some nerds gets filled with nerdrage when tech isn't marketed to them, I guess. They also go about trying to sell products in all the wrong fashion and don't understand what drives people to buy them, and end up calling said (and popular) products crap in some hipster-nerd type of elitism which doesn't exactly bring them closer to understanding the market.

Anyway, from what I read, Apple's users more willingly pay for apps, so developers develop more willingly for iPhone. Since the price difference on iPhone and Android products are miniscule when subsidized, it's going to become a "It's the Apps stupid!" cycle ala Apple vs PC wars, except Apple is going to be on the flip side despite having a smaller base. (Also, less fragmentation of devices is nice for the developer as well, but $$$ is king of course.)

Though I wish Web OS became more popular, iOS and its clone Android has UI quirks that annoy me.

You are delusional if you think Android is marked for nerd by nerds. It is marketed like any other crap on the face of the planet, which is to say mindlessly to build name recognition. Nerds are not going to get their nerd specs from a fucking TV commercial. Ads more or less just scream over and over the name of the product and try and lodge some sort of image in your head. It doesn't matter if it is big green robots or dancing shadow people, they just want to lodge something in your head, not actually

Watch those, and tell me with a straight face that this is advertising for nerds, by nerds, and by people who have no concept what the words "user experience" means.

I'll grant you that's not by nerds, for nerds.

But how is that anything about user experience? The ad is TOTALLY devoid of any user experience using the phone, looking out from the phone you know nothing at all about how the phone is to use or what it can do.

I am pretty convinced those kinds of ads (and I've seen them for other products) do nothing whatsoever to drive sales. How could they? Why would I remember HTC in connection to 30 seconds of nothing?

Can YOU honestly say with a straight face any of those ads would compel someone to even think about asking to look at HTC phones in a store, much less go out and get one?

I don't have an iPhone 4s. I have an iPhone 4. I didn't really feel like I needed a new phone right now, so I chose to skip this round... but every time I see a 4s commercial I start to question my choice to skip. Those are powerful ads.

I don't have an iPhone 4s. I have an iPhone 4. I didn't really feel like I needed a new phone right now, so I chose to skip this round... but every time I see a 4s commercial I start to question my choice to skip. Those are powerful ads.

To Apple users. To me, I really don't see any reason to buy an iPhone when I can get all of the features I want for half the cost. (keeping in mind that I flatly refuse to sign a contract with a cell provider, so I'm paying retail, not a subsidized cost). Most of the iPhone sales I see happening right now appear to be people upgrading their old iPhone. The smartphone market is basically saturated, and the few people I know who've switched from one brand to another were actually switching from iPhone to an A

They call it "building the brand". The idea is that the name HTC is now in your head. When you decide to buy a new phone and you flick through the metaphorical catalogue, you'll think of HTC as an option, where before it might have been some anonymous entity you've never heard of.

It probably works; most big companies play the same game. The recent UK McDonald's adverts, where there's barely a morsel of food in sight, is similar. Same goes for all those car adverts where you just get a stream of vaguely sugg

You're right those are great commercials. HTC also does a wonderful job of keeping their phones up to data and has a great reputation. Had Verizon not signed Apple I would have gotten an HTC.

I just wish they did battery life.

My wife has an HTC (the Droid Eris) and she would disagree about HTC keeping their phones up to date. She is stuck on Android 2.1 which means she can't even move her apps to the SD card. I rooted her phone and put Cyanogen mod on it, but it's not one of the main phones supported by Cyanogen mod, so it takes awhile for new releases of that to get to her. And after seeing that the iPhone 3GS (which was released before her phone) is still being supported and getting new releases, she decided that her new phone

You are right. The Droid Eris is unusual for an HTC. It came out 2 versions behind and only got one update (though it was a big one). Possibly HTC figures if you bought a 1.5 phone in late 2009 (after 2.0 was out) you just don't care about the version. Their reputation comes from the MyTouch and the EVO. The HTC Hero also is pretty tragic.

That ad for what you can do with the iPhone was actually an ad for what you can do with iOS. That works fine for Apple because if they convince you to use iOS the only product you're going to buy is an iPhone.

On the other hand if Motorola puts out an ad highlighting all the things you can do with Android then even if they convince you to get an Android phone there's no guarantee you'll by _their_ Android phone.

This isn't an insurmountable problem, they could split the time between what's good about Android and what's good about their phone, or talk about features of Android without mentioning they're features that _all_ Android phones have. But it probably seems safer to the executives to only focus on what's cool about _their_ phone.

And of course the other thing is that i believe historically commercials that have gone with the whiz-bang appeal have done better than commercials that tried to be informative. As a nerd this always bothered me because i'm more interested in facts than presentation. (Not that i don't enjoy a well done presentation, but i try not to let my purchasing habits be influenced by it.) But i guess the majority of the male 18-35 demographic that commercials always try to aim at doesn't think the same way.

So another question to ask is, what demographic is the Apple commercial appealing to? And is it actually more successful overall than the Android commercials? The iPhone is certainly selling well above any individual Android model, but it's selling well below the total Android ecosystem. If one company switched to similar informative commercials would they actually see an increase in sales? Or is the iPhone's dominance as a single model due to some other factor? Again, as i nerd i actually like the tack the Apple commercial is taking (even if i get offended at all the times they imply, or even state outright, that you can't do the same thing on Android when you most certainly can) but historically appealing to people like me hasn't usually led to widespread market success.

So given all the differences between the Apple/iOS/Apple/iPhone model and the Google/Android/Dozens of companies/hundreds of phones model it's hard to say when comparing marketing strategies and measures of success is valid and when it's comparing, well, apples to oranges.

Good point about Android manufacturers. That's part of the downside of a fragmented marketplace. RIM and Apple just have to sell you on their platform while Android people have to sell you on their particular models, and that's frankly hard when they are so generic. Which is precisely the problem PC manufacturers have had, they are selling a commodity.

The other thing is that Android does well selling to a lot of niches. Android feature phones don't do all the stuff the expensive HTC do either.

So another question to ask is, what demographic is the Apple commercial appealing to? And is it actually more successful overall than the Android commercials? The iPhone is certainly selling well above any individual Android model, but it's selling well below the total Android ecosystem.

The commercial is appealing to people with disposable income who don't care about the tech specs or ROM versions of the devices that improve their lives. That's why Apple is leading the phone market in revenue by an amount s

What most nerds don't get about advertising and user experience is WHY. What can this do to me and why? "What do I get out of the freedom of Android (or Linux)?" It needs to be something that the user, the normal user, actually cares about. As a side note, I honestly can't think of any reason the freedom of Linux would provide to casual users, compared to Windows and OSX. That is probably the reason why Linux still isn't on desktop. It's also what Stallman constantly forgets to mention and just comes out as

It's because Android devices are marketed for nerds, by nerds. And nerds don't understand marketing or user experience.

I think the "not understanding user experience" is a big problem in the tech industry, and Apple seems to be the only company paying attention to the user experience. Nerds/engineers simply fail to understand; the whole thing goes over their heads.

I've had lots of conversations with nerds/engineers about this, and when I try to talk about how Apple focuses on "user experience", they insist that Apple just makes "prettier" interfaces. To a lot of the people involved in these things, there's a false dichotomy that research and development is either focused on "useful features" or "useless superficial things, like pretty interfaces". They don't understand that there can be such a thing as "too many features", making the user experience confusing and frustrating. They don't seem to understand that it matters how you organize programs, options, and settings in your UI, that it only matters whether the features are there, and not how you access them.

The reason usability is so important is that "features" are only useful if people can figure out what those features are and how to use them effectively. UI design is important, not just to make things pretty, but to give visual cues about how to use the Interface, and to provide intuitive organization. The fact is, smartphones and computers are about as powerful as they need to be to do the things we want to do, and improving usability is probably the most important challenge right now. That is, making it easier to do the things you want to do, and removing the obstacles that prevent you from being productive.

I'm of the opinion that iCloud may end up being one of the great underestimated advancements in computing of the past couple years-- comprehensive data syncing between an entire ecosystem of Internet-connected devices. However, it requires a sort of vertical integration that only Apple is positioned to achieve. In short, I'm probably going to be stuck being an Apple customer for the foreseeable future because Apple is the only consumer electronics company that hasn't stalled out in terms of developing more usable products.

I'm a nerd and I know how to set up backups with rsync and a cron job. Quite often I just don't get around to doing that.With my Mac I just turned on TimeMachine and since then my backup is never more than an hour old.

The last I can also successfully get my mom to do over the phone, the first one I can't.

Apple design is great until someone actually points out an Apple failure. Then the fanboys will try to talk around the issue, marginalize the problem, and marginalize those that are capable of seeing the problem.

I haven't found a perfect phone, computer, or operating system. Every one has its warts. I choose to use the ones which annoy me the least. These tend to be Apple products for things I directly interact with, and Linux (typically Ubuntu) or FreeBSD for things I don't directly touch.

Are there problems with Apple products? Absolutely. There are also problems with Windows and Linux. So I'm not sure I see what you're getting at.

A shiny veneer is great, but some of us just want to get stuff done. Apple's designs aren't all they are hyped to be in this regard.

See, I guess I don't see that.

With (most) Apple products, I find that I spend less time trying to get my computer to work in a way that I can get stuff done, and more time getting stuff done.

Phone devices are a relatively cheap way to find this out for yourself. Hopefully Apple won't manage to litigate competitors out of the market.

Agreed. Without Android, Apple would likely still have a shitty notifications system. Certainly they wouldn't have been able to steal the best UI feature of Android. They might have come up with something as good. I doubt they would do better.

Competition is good, and the patent wars are patently absurd.

I went from a Windows Mobile phone to an iPhone, to and Android. Then I went back to iPhone. There are things about the Android that I loved--the reflowing text when you tap-to-zoom is fantastic. Far and away better than Apple, who only zooms to the DIV element (which might be too large to read, requiring pinch-zooming and then scrolling.) Though I never needed to use it, I like the ability to install third-party software (which isn't available on every Android device, by the way.) And Google had the cloud down long before Apple. The notifications were better than Apple's pre-iOS5. Both of these last two points are now addressed on the iPhone. I also loved that I could view an app manifest in order to know what kinds of things an app was going to have permissions to do, though this wasn't always completely helpful (full internet access was required to view ads--a fairly big permission to do a very common task.)

But ultimately, I felt like I was fighting my Android phone constantly. Scrolling was terrible--I would move my finger across the screen, and about a second later the view would scroll. Apps running in the background slowed my phone down constantly and drained the battery--I had to wipe the phone and install apps one by one until I found which one was doing it (the battery usage screen wasn't showing any third-party app as using a lot of battery.) People could never understand me on the phone--a problem I didn't have before or since (a different Android phone might have fixed that, but it's hard to shop for that particular feature and I don't want to have to return phones until I find one that is usable as a phone.) The mail client (not the Gmail client) was awful. Like something out of the iPhone's first release. I had far more problems with the market, which seemed to auto-update itself and often didn't show me accurate information. And don't get me started on updates. I was running a vulnerable version of the OS for quite some time before I finally rooted and used Cyanogen--more fighting with the phone. Updates to Cyanogen never worked right. Even when I managed to get the update installed, it often utterly killed my performance unless I wiped and reinstalled. Then I had to set a bunch of stuff back up--only some things would be restored from the cloud.

When looking for new phones recently, I realized that there's no coherence for Android devices. Every one is vastly different. On the one hand, this provides more choice. On the other, it's quite overwhelming

What you call a design failure is usually just a feature nerds care about and typical users don't. That's what most commenters on here completely fail to understand, and that's why the iPod, iPhone, and iPad have outsold ever competitor no matter what the nerds have called failures.

That doesn't mean those products haven't had design issues or missing features, it just means that your definition of a failure is skewed by your opinion of what a device can/should do.

More like, "I am one, so I feel that I can point out our failures." Hopefully instead of being taken as a sneering attack from an outsider, people can understand that it's one of their own pointing out something that we tend to overlook.

Anyway, it's not true that nerds/engineers fail to understand.

No, really they do fail to understand. Not all of them, but a really large portion. Of course, one of the things that tends to happen when you don't understand something is that you fail to understand that you don't understand it.

I had a minor epiphany the other day when an iPhone user was looking over my shoulder at my Android tablet. First words: "You probably can't get very many apps for it, can you?". Holy shit - Apple is pulling a Microsoft on the market. They've so fully saturated the market's hearts and minds that people see non-Apple portable devices as "less than".

While I agree with everything in TFA, I think just doing a little more advertising is probably not going to do it.

heh, the first thing i see with the Apple ads is that the are basically show and tell instruction videos (here is how to take a photo, here is how to buy a app, here is how to do XYZ). No wonder Apple products are "easy to use", we are being told how things are done at every advertisement break...

Let me guess. You're trying to sync from Linux aren't you. The fault isn't iOS, but rather the syncing tool you are using. Blame that on Apple too though, since they have always tried to lock down the syncing. If I used "Clementine" to sync file to the ipod touch they always came across as audio regardless of whether they were videos. But if I use GtkPod, it seems to work fine. And of course iTunes on Windows always works too.

So, what's wrong with USB anyway? I LIKE the fact that I can plug my android phone into a $2 car charger, and not have to buy the $35 sold at the phone store.

They don't really need a standard connector so much as a standard protocol for communicating over it beyond just filesystem access/etc.

And yes, phone commercials that barely even show you the phone are really annoying. I really don't care that their CGI robot can smash a CGI alien or whatever - I'm buying a phone, not a combat robot...

USB does USB and power. The iAccessory port does USB, power, analog audio output and playback control. Very nice for accessory manufacturers, as it means they don't need complex and expensive electronics.

So, what's wrong with USB anyway? I LIKE the fact that I can plug my android phone into a $2 car charger,

I can do the same thing with my iPhone because I can simply use the supplied cable into any USB port.

But I can also do more. I can be reasonably sure I can go into most hotels and dock my iPhone with the radio for playback (or charging), no cables required. If I forget a cable when I travel I think it is MORE LIKLEY I will be able to find an iPhone USB charging cable or some device to charge the phone,

That's not "more standard." That's just de-facto acceptance due to the commonality of the device. The port is still totally proprietary and I have no doubt that Apple would sue the fuck out of anyone else that used it.

To the user on the street though that does not matter. The FACT is that as a user, you can find more ways to make use of the iPhone dock connector and more devices that support it in everyday life.

To the end user that is all they know, is what they can do. And to them the iPhone connector appears simply to be more standard, more widely available, even if they have no idea why other companies cannot use it.

So, what's wrong with USB anyway? I LIKE the fact that I can plug my android phone into a $2 car charger, and not have to buy the $35 sold at the phone store.

What? iDevices charge from a regular USB socket. Just get something like this [amazon.co.uk] which turns a car lighter socket into a USB A power socket - works fine with iDevices or Androids - just check the reviews to make sure it delivers enough juice.

So, what's wrong with USB anyway? I LIKE the fact that I can plug my android phone into a $2 car charger, and not have to buy the $35 sold at the phone store.

They don't really need a standard connector so much as a standard protocol for communicating over it beyond just filesystem access/etc.

The trouble with (just) USB is that only handles two sorts of use case gracefully, the second less so than the first:

1. Phone is USB slave, some reasonably powerful device is USB master: In this case, the phone can be charged and can expose any function supported by a USB device class or custom driver on the USB master. Most phones only actually seem to expose a USB Mass Storage device, along with ADB if turned on; but there isn't any architectural barrier to exposing other phone functions, camera as USB

If the Android makers could standardize on anything, ie that the port will be on the center bottom, you'd see stuff designed that way since it could work with multiple devices.

Never gonna happen.

If I, as a handset manufacturer, do something like that, what differentiates me from any other Android handset manufacturer? I'm already running out of things to compete on now that I'm using the same platform as everyone else, last thing I need is to reduce that further.

More than that... standardizing on a single spot for the cable would also require standardizing on certain dimensions for the phone itself... that would prevent certain form factors and features from being added to the phone... stuff like, for example, having an actual honest-to-goodness hardware keyboard, which is a feature I won't buy a phone without. If, the next time I need a phone, I can't get an Android with a real keyboard, then I will end up buying a WinMo phone, as HTC makes one that isn't complete

Android, unlike iOS, has marketing funded by many different organizations and managers separately, working competitively against other Android manufacturers. They are each trying to differentiate from the other.

iTunes was the main reason I went from my iPhone 3GS to my Galaxy S. While I never experienced the data corruption as some have, I found it really irritating to have to use Mac/iTunes or Win/iTunes to do something with my phone - I am using linux 99% of the time.

The main one was iTunes trying to organize my library, even when I specifically turned that feature off. That was the tipping point. Leave my organization alone.

iTunes was the main reason I went from my iPhone 3GS to my Galaxy S. While I never experienced the data corruption as some have, I found it really irritating to have to use Mac/iTunes or Win/iTunes to do something with my phone - I am using linux 99% of the time.

Yes, Apple and iPhone will really be losing out because of all those Linux users.

Small thing I'd really like: My phone can be used as a USB tethered internet connection. But my android tablet doesn't support using the same device to get it's connection - if I hook phone to tablet, all I can do is transfer files. It'd be nice to have internet too.

If you are following the links looking for information on the origin of the port on the ipod, the link from the old slashdot story [oynk.com] doesn't work any more. Of course, that is a link to a site that isn't managed by slashdot or their overlords, so they don't have control over it (not) being there.

"On a similar front, as a mostly happy Android user, I must admit envy for the jillions of accessories marketed for the iPhone, especially ones that take advantage of that Apple-only accessory port; maybe the Android Open Accessory project will help."

And 70% of iPhone users would replace your "mostly" with "very", whereas only 50% of Android users would. But it seems you're not even in that group so why not get something more likely to keep you very happy?

I don't know about the writer, but in my case it's because i've tried friends' iPods and iPhones, and they do not make me more happy, just more frustrated. I'm interested in what makes _me_ happy, not what statistically makes other people happy.

Maybe that's because i got a top line Android phone that is in every way comparable to an iPhone. Do you actually have a study to back up your statistics or are you just making things up? If there is such a study did it differentiate between people who were willing

And it does indeed appear that all phones that are part of the OS are getting lumped together. The article complains about Windows 7 getting lumped together with Windows Mobile, but there's a similar problem for all the OSes besides iOS. Apple doesn't sell crappy hardware, so i'm not surprised Apple came in head and shoulders above everyone else. If they broke the results down both by OS versions and by phone models the results would be much more interesting and informative. As it is the results are practic

One interesting thing about the "good" Apple ad vs. the "bad" Droid ad in the article is that the Apple ad is bright and sparkly and clean, while the Droid ad is much darker and sexier, with a pretty woman writhing all around.

Reminds me of those Microsoft ads promoting IE's new private browsing feature. Their example was of a husband using it to hide from his wife a purchase of flowers to show how he loves her... not only is there a huge elephant in the room, but the visible efforts of the writers to look away from it only serve to further direct attention to its presence. Everyone knows the *real* reason for private browsing. Something for which internet is really, really gre

Some should be showing off new features that Apple doesn't have like the new face unlock feature in Android 4.0.

Yeah, when there are phones shipping with Android 4.0 and front facing cameras that can use the features. Marketing features that aren't yet available to the end users is a REALLY bad idea.

Others should highlight their restrictive model: picture the old Mac vs. PC ads, but with the iPhone checking with Apple before denying the user's request to install an app of their choice.

This would probably backfire, how many trojans and programs that send your info back to the developer's server have been found in the Android marketplace? Lots. Apple would almost certainly use that in a counter-attack ad.

Market your strengths, but be careful of those that also have an underlying weakness/vulnerability, it will come back to bite you.

Android needs more standardization. A standard UI, a minimum resolution, and a minimum hardware set. One of the things Apple has done very effectively is manage the user experience. MS Windows and Android have allowed manufacturers to put out devices with too little RAM, CPU, and/or poor quality screens, keyboards, touch-screens and it hurts the reputation of the platform. When a user buys a bad Windows or Android device, they're as likely to blame the OS as they are the hardware manufacturer. Failing to understand and address that is a marketing failure on the part of the OS vendor.

Android needs more standardization. A standard UI, a minimum resolution, and a minimum hardware set.

The problem is that you have a bunch of different manufacturers who are all trying to differentiate themselves. Motorola and HTC don't want to have the same interface and hardware as each other, because they're competing with each other and each is looking for an edge. Almost as importantly, each is looking for a way to establish their brand and inspire brand loyalty. Oh, and they also don't really want standardized accessories because they want to force you to re-buy all of your accessories when you buy

And the reason they've shipped phones with too little RAM/CPU and poor quality screens is essentially that consumers often demand crap. It's kind of a general problem, not limited to cell phones, that people want stuff but they don't want to pay for quality. That's why we have McDonalds restaurants all over the place and Best Buys filled with eMachines computers.

Consumers don't demand crap. Consumers largely shop on price. Retailers (and in the US, wireless carriers) buy devices to hit certain price points that they can advertise. Consumers don't have access to information to compare the devices, so put the blame where it belongs, with the sellers who are willing to sell crap because they know people will buy it and then blame the manufacturer (rather than the company who knowingly or carelessly sold them a piece of crap to make a profit).

2 Could be done via the mentioned Accessory system (it is barely 7 months old, so give it time).

3 has the issue of design restraint. i suspect some kind of NFC/induction system is more likely to work then a physical connector. There are however an attempt at a dock connector, called PDMI. But so far the only big name that seems to use it is Samsung, and they even managed to "proprietize" the implementation.

I'm pretty sure not many of my friends know the difference between IOS and Android.

If I asked everyone I know outside of work what kind of phone they have, the answers would be something like this:

iPhone
HTC
Nokia
iPhone 4
Samsung
Motorola
etc

I'm not even sure the responses would be particularly different at work (I work in a technical environment). Perhaps tomorrow I'll try it and see if anyone actually mentions the terms "IOS" or "Android". I hadn't realised until very recently that lots of different phones ran the same operating system, and I'm reasonably technical - I just don't have much interest in phone technology beyond making sure the one I buy does the things I want it to do (make phone calls, sync with iTunes) without me having to learn how to work something new.

My first mobile phone was a Nokia. Over the next 15 years, every phone I had was a Nokia. There were probably "better" phones on the market, but I liked Nokia, I knew how to work them, and I couldn't see any reason to change. When the iPhone came out, I thought "I wouldn't need to carry my iPod around everywhere as well as my phone if I bought one of those", so I got an iPhone. I like my iPhone, it does everything I want it to, and I know how to work it. Which probably means my next phone will also be an iPhone.

In many respects, despite having a technical profession, and being a "geek" in many areas which interest me, I'm actually just a typical consumer. I buy stuff from brands which have made stuff I like in the past.

I think a phone needs a barometer just about as badly as it needs to support SCSI devices.

I don't think you understand the purpose of the barometer - it's to allow a faster GPS lock. On more than one occasion, I've entered a new destination into my phone while in a new town, exited a parking garage and then have to guess which way to go while I wait for the phone to get a GPS lock.

I don't think you understand the purpose of the barometer - it's to allow a faster GPS lock. On more than one occasion, I've entered a new destination into my phone while in a new town, exited a parking garage and then have to guess which way to go while I wait for the phone to get a GPS lock.

I have to call you out on this; it makes little sense to me. The phone already has a rough idea of where it is from cell tower triangulation.

Your approach would sam to be to do a power hungry full-on GPS scan every ti

Apple tried the 'vs' ads with their Mac vs Windows, and as popular as those ads were, they didn't help Apple much in sales.

Huh? When Apple started those ads they were a barely profitable niche player. After running those for 5 years (and making improvements) they owned about 80% of the profits from the PC market leaving everyone else fending for who gets to produce boxes for cost. And they are still growing, creating more users willing to pay them hundreds more for their perceived value.

The national Android device commercials in the US feature CGI laden whiz-bang special effects - a guy piloting a spaceship with a Xoom tablet, robots flipping phones around in the air, Droid Razrs ripping through the air, slicing through light posts, etc...

The Apple ads show an iPhone on a plain white background, with people using them, accompanied by the "Apple jingle" piano piece. "This is an iPhone, you can do this with it, and this, and this..."

You mean the port that means you always need a special cable? The port that proves that Apple's profit is way more important than user friendliness?

You mean the special cable that is so ubiquitous that it costs 50 cents [amazon.com]? Heck, push the boat out and get the $1.50 one....

Hopefully your micro-USB chargers are the sensible sort with a full-size USB socket built into the adapter (like the Apple chargers) so you can also use them to charge older mini-USB devices as well as iDevices.